I have seen a few different mistakes that seem to get repeatedly made when managing an account or paid search campaign, wether or not it is a large or small spend. If you are managing a substantial amount of money, it is very crucial that you do not make these mistakes we will be talking about today. Here is a simple list of 7 deadly sins that we must avoid at all costs.

1. First and foremost, not monitoring your performance on a daily basis.

I can assure you that nearly all accounts, there is an ROI in advanced ad scheduling, and also day parting. Make sure to keep an eye on the dimensions tab and check out the “day of week” and “hour of day” performance, and day part all your bids downwards under the advanced ad scheduling for the hours of the day that don’t covert very well. Do it carefully, if you price up bids by 40% of the original bid during your off hours, you may not have your ads show up.

2. For crying out loud, monitor google’s “search network.”

In most verticals, google’s search network performs vastly diffferent than google search. In others though, they may be exactly the same, or very very similar. It is an important thing to know whether or not the search network has been underperforming. Using the adwords user interface, you can monitor this, even within the last few hours!

3. Misusing Campaigns

The reason we have campaigns, is to have settings. If you did not need different settings for each campaign amongst ad groups, then you dont need any different campaigns. That is, unless your campaign has run out of space for any more ad groups. Usually the normal choice to group ad groups into campaigns by themes is a good one, but they will require different settings. These may include search, content, search network, dayparting, ad rotation, geographic, etc. If you have an option to have one account instead of three, do it.

4. Too many accounts, too many keywords

We touched on this in the last sin, but I have see junior search marketers thinking up huge campaigns using excel’s features. While often good to get the tail wherever possible, so to speak, having tons and tons of keywords that do not get volume are a management nightmare, and do no one any good. simplify, simplify, simplify.

5. Untested Landing pages are a NO-NO.

Landing page testing needs to be mandatory. While some get lost in the account side of paid search, it is important to not become lazy with landing pages, and make sure you are testing these, as they can triple your conversion rates easily, increasing ROI and margins.

6. Letting default search engine settings make all the rules.

Tablets for google desktop campaigns is a perfect example of this. Tere will undoubtedly be discrepancy between desktop performance and tablets, in some campaigns at least. Google will want campaigns to have a regualr or standard delivery on ads. This may not be the best way to get your ads out. Always do things your way, not google’s way!

7. Mobile browsers get ignored.

Even if you do not have a mobile website, people are still viewing it on thier smartphones anyway. if you do not have one, that does not mean that you cannot run mobile ads on the site. Make sure you are advertising for mobile in a separate campaign, as the costs associated with that vary quite a bit from your average desktop campaign. You can still get great ROI, even though the volume will not be as high.

Hopefully this list of 7 sins helps you out! Try these tips, and get back to us and let us know how they helped you out! Don’t waste your time on this, get after it now!